The Death of Leonid Brezhnev and the Long Battle for Russia's Future

By Brian Whitmore

When the Soviet premier died 30 years ago, it opened up a series of political debates and power struggles that continue to this day.

Brezhnev waves from his stand atop the Lenin Mausoleum to marchers in the traditional Red Square parade marking the anniversary of the 1917 revolution, in Moscow, November 7, 1980. (AP)

In many ways, the current battle for Russia's future began 30 years ago today. On November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, sparking a generational
change in the Soviet leadership and setting in motion an ongoing cycle
of reform and reaction in Russia that remains incomplete and
inconclusive to this day. The players' names have changed as has the lexicon, but the fundamental
issue remains essentially the same: how to carry out essential reforms
when said reforms threaten the existing elite's continued dominance.

Brezhnev's death heralded the exit from the scene of the so-called
"Class of 1937" -- the generation of Soviet leaders that quickly climbed
the Communist Party's ranks following the Stalinist purges and ruled
the country for decades thereafter. By the end of Brezhnev's rule, the Soviet economy, perilously dependent
on commodities exports, was stagnating and contracting as oil prices
fell. The political system was ossified, corruption rampant, and public
cynicism endemic. The consensus within key quarters of the rising
generation of the elite was that reform was essential.

The two main constituencies pushing for change -- the KGB and
technocratic "regime liberals" -- made for an unlikely alliance. But
this odd coalition teamed up to pick two Soviet leaders: Yury Andropov (the KGB's candidate) and Mikhail Gorbachev (the technocrats' choice). And it should come as no surprise that the two key meta-clans in
Vladimir Putin's Kremlin are the siloviki and the technocrats. These
bureaucratic descendants of the very same alliance that anointed
Andropov and Gorbachev in the 1980s also put Putin in the Kremlin at the
turn of the millennium.

Andropov was able to bring together a coalition of people who
realized that some kind of change was necessary. It was a very
broad-based coalition that ranged -- in Soviet Communist Party terms --
from liberals all the way to hardliners whose idea of reform was turning
the screws and getting the workers to work harder. They all agreed on
one basic notion, that the status quo was not sustainable. That was the
thing that held together the Andropov coalition -- and it was the
Andropov coalition that would lead to Gorbachev's rise. As soon as he
[Gorbachev] tried to operationalize it he had trouble. How can you hold
that disparate coalition together? Putin saw some of these pressures
being played out...and its already failed. The creative capacities have
been used up.

Andropovism and Gorbachevism represent two paths for a stagnating
authoritarian system to reform itself -- and both eventually lead to a
dead end. The Andropov model, which the sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya has
called "authoritarian modernization," is similar to the path China has
followed until now -- tightly managed economic reform that introduces
market mechanisms, albeit without political reform.

Due to Andropov's death in 1984, it never got off the ground in the
Soviet Union. But it was the model for Putin's rule, which exposed its
limitations. In the short term it leads to growth and prosperity. But in
the long run, said growth and prosperity leads to the creation of a
middle class that eventually clamors for political rights. Denying these
rights saps the system's "creative capacity" and leads to instability.

And if pushed to its logical conclusion, the Gorbachev model, which
envisions more comprehensive economic and political reform, eventually unleashes forces that lead to a level of pluralism that brings down the authoritarian system.

Both models also inevitably split the coalition of siloviki and technocratic liberals that spawned it. In the case of the Andropov model, the technocrats rebel and team up with the emerging middle class in pushing for greater pluralism, as exiled members of Putin's team, like former finance minister Aleksei Kudrin, are doing now. And as the full implications of the Gorbachev model play out, the siloviki ultimately rebel -- as they did in August 1991.

If Putin followed Andropovism throughout his first stint in the Kremlin
from 2000-04, Dmitry Medvedev's presidency had the feel of a Gorbachev
redux. And while September 2011, when Putin announced his return to the
Kremlin, wasn't quite the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, the
impulse was the same: the siloviki feared losing power and made their
move to stop any more change. They famously failed in August 1991, but
were more successful last autumn. So three decades after Brezhnev's death, we've come full circle. The
system remains deadlocked with nothing in sight to break the logjam.